Tag: Melanie Bowles

Working in Illustrator, as well as Photoshop this time. This was a very confusing tutorial. A lot of the things it told me to do, I couldn’t do. Like copying in Illustrator and then pasting in Photoshop. The book is a few years old, so perhaps on earlier versions of Illustrator and Photoshop you were able to do this. I worked through the tutorial as best as I could, to create the same image that the book was telling me to do. It has taught me how to use the blend tool, which I didn’t know before (or at least couldn’t remember if I did).

I really didn’t like this tutorial and I certainly didn’t like the results. I think it’s important to do these tutorials to learn though. They teach you the basics so that you can then use that knowledge to create your own designs. After working through the book, it’ll be interesting to use different methods from each tutorial to combine them to create something of my taste.

Hi everyone, I’ve been in a bit of a creative slump recently, but have been throwing myself into books. This caused me to pick up an old book that I had from university, called ‘Digital Textile Design’ by Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac.

I’ve decided to see if I can work through it, which in turn, I’m hoping will inspire me to do the same with the other creative books I have.

The first tutorial is ‘Using Filters in Photoshop’. I’ve decided to use roses that I have photographed for this task, just as the example shows, and so that I can easily compare my work to the work in the book.

First thing I did was open 5 different photographs of roses that I have taken, then I created a new page in Photoshop to create a collage. I selected the size as A3 (as we were always taught to use that size at university) and rotated it to landscape. I then cut out roses from the 5 separate photographs using the lasso tool and then selecting ‘cut’ from the edit menu and pasted them individually on my A3 page, resizing and adjusting as required.

My finished collage:

The first filter we are asked to look at is the ‘Cut Out‘ filter. You can adjust the settings on the filters by using the sliding scales to see which you feel work better for your image. For the Cut Out filter, I used:

Number of levels – 7
Edge simplicity – 4
Edge fidelity – 3

The next filter we are asked to look at is the ‘Coloured Pencil‘ filter.

The settings I used for this were:

Pencil width – 3
Stroke pressure – 11
Paper brightness – 44

The third filter we look at is the ‘Soft‘ (on my version of Photoshop its called ‘Smart Blur’) filter, allowing you to soften the edges of your collage. This didn’t make a huge difference to my image, so I had to crank the slider right up to see any effect really, however slight it is…

The settings I used for this were:

Radius – 88.8
Threshold – 100.0
Quality – High
Mode – Normal

The fourth filter we look at is the ‘Vintage‘ filter. We do this by adding a grain texture. Again, I struggled to make much difference, so had to increase the intensity and contrast quite high.

The settings I used for this were:

Intensity – 100
Contrast – 77
Grain type – Regular

The fifth filter is ‘Pop Art‘, which we create by using the ‘Colour halftone’ filter found in Pixelate filters. Unfortunately we don’t get a preview of what it will look like, there isn’t a slider to adjust for this filter, so I just randomly typed in the numbers below.

The ninth and final filter is ‘Silk-Screen Effect’. Which you create by using ‘Posterize’.

The settings I used are:

Levels – 3

What did I think? I particularly like the ‘Pixelate’ filter, and the ‘Cut Out’ filter. I was disappointed with the results of a few of the filters that didn’t show much difference, but I believe that was probably because of the colours of the roses that I chose were quite similar. I imagine a vast array of colours will produce a more dramatic effect.